We all have faced the situation of ‘too much work, too little time’ more often than we would like to admit. These situations call for some great time management skills.
With poor time management, tasks, projects, and performance of your employees can spiral out of hand very easily. As a leader or a manager, it is your responsibility to ensure that your team has skills that will help you avoid blunders in your organization in terms of goals achieved. It is the managers that can help employees learn about prioritizing tasks, sticking to the daily schedule, or maybe just how to handle the responsibilities and take ownership.
For most of the corporates and managers, employee time management might be the least of the concerns on their list. However, once it starts impacting the business and its operations, it is probably the time to also start looking for solutions for the same.
In this article, you can read about how you can help your employees and coworkers manage their time effectively and tackle the challenges that they might face in the future.
Ways to tackle employee time management issues
1. Avoid unrealistic timelines and expectations
The first and foremost step in ensuring that your employees do not feel overburdened and thus, mismanage their time is by setting clear timelines. Make sure these timelines and the expectations that come with it are realistic. When you put yourself in your employees’ shoes and allow them enough time to complete the workload they have been assigned with, they are self-motivated to put their best foot forward.
When employees have clear timelines, they will understand what tasks to prioritize first without feeling too overwhelmed with the work that has been delegated to them. This will also lead to minimal procrastination from their side.
Also, it is best to ensure that you give your employees the freedom to say no when they are overloaded with work. This will ensure they are not burnout and are also able to allot their time more effectively.
2. Teach them how to plan and estimate time better
As a leader or a manager, it is your responsibility to inspire and teach your employees the importance of planning. Most of the time, it is your lack of planning that can result in poor time management. To ensure that you and your team is not wasting time, it is best to figure out how a workday is usually spent and work on the ways to eliminate the hours that are being wasted.
Auditing your time is perhaps the best way to do this. With time audit, you can also understand and plan on spending your time more wisely and efficiently.
While planning, teach your employees to convert large projects into smaller deliverables. With smaller deliverables, they can manage the time well as it will be easier to figure out how long a particular task will take.
3. Invest in a time tracking app
Owing to the advancement in technology, there are plenty of digital tools that are now available in the market to make your life easy. One such tool is a time tracking app. The best time tracking app that is available, makes sure that you upskill your time management and stay on track when it comes to project completion.
A time tracking app allows your employees to understand the amount of time they take to complete a project. This helps them to allot their time better and manage their work accordingly, thus enabling them to work on their time management skills.
Conclusion
Time management is one element that can make or break your business. When your employees fail to manage their time, the chances of their work spiraling out of control increases. Moreover, they tend to burn out when they are overburdened with work for too long. Time tracking software is one solution to make you and your employee both manage your time effectively as well as ensure that as managers, you don’t overload your employees with work.
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